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❶The Research Council of Norway. Some of the sources of error in your dissertation may include:

Assessing Reliability

If the questions are regarding historical time periods, with no reference to any artistic movement, stakeholders may not be motivated to give their best effort or invest in this measure because they do not believe it is a true assessment of art appreciation. Construct Validity is used to ensure that the measure is actually measure what it is intended to measure i. The experts can examine the items and decide what that specific item is intended to measure. Students can be involved in this process to obtain their feedback.

The questions are written with complicated wording and phrasing. It is important that the measure is actually assessing the intended construct, rather than an extraneous factor. Criterion-Related Validity is used to predict future or current performance - it correlates test results with another criterion of interest.

If a physics program designed a measure to assess cumulative student learning throughout the major. The new measure could be correlated with a standardized measure of ability in this discipline, such as an ETS field test or the GRE subject test.

The higher the correlation between the established measure and new measure, the more faith stakeholders can have in the new assessment tool. If the measure can provide information that students are lacking knowledge in a certain area, for instance the Civil Rights Movement, then that assessment tool is providing meaningful information that can be used to improve the course or program requirements.

Sampling Validity similar to content validity ensures that the measure covers the broad range of areas within the concept under study. For example, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory has sub scales measuring differently behaviors such depression, schizophrenia, social introversion.

Therefore the split-half method was not be an appropriate method to assess reliability for this personality test. The test-retest method assesses the external consistency of a test. Examples of appropriate tests include questionnaires and psychometric tests. It measures the stability of a test over time. A typical assessment would involve giving participants the same test on two separate occasions. If the same or similar results are obtained then external reliability is established.

The disadvantages of the test-retest method are that it takes a long time for results to be obtained. The timing of the test is important; if the duration is to brief then participants may recall information from the first test which could bias the results. Alternatively, if the duration is too long it is feasible that the participants could have changed in some important way which could also bias the results.

This refers to the degree to which different raters give consistent estimates of the same behavior. Inter-rater reliability can be used for interviews. Note, it can also be called inter-observer reliability when referring to observational research. Here researcher when observe the same behavior independently to avoided bias and compare their data. If the data is similar then it is reliable. In this scenario it would be unlikely they would record aggressive behavior the same and the data would be unreliable.

However, if they were to operationalize the behavior category of aggression this would be more objective and make it easier to identify when a specific behavior occurs. Are the findings genuine? Is hand strength a valid measure of intelligence? Almost certainly the answer is "No, it is not. The answer depends on the amount of research support for such a relationship.

Internal validity - the instruments or procedures used in the research measured what they were supposed to measure. As part of a stress experiment, people are shown photos of war atrocities. After the study, they are asked how the pictures made them feel, and they respond that the pictures were very upsetting.

In this study, the photos have good internal validity as stress producers. External validity - the results can be generalized beyond the immediate study.

In order to have external validity, the claim that spaced study studying in several sessions ahead of time is better than cramming for exams should apply to more than one subject e. It should also apply to people beyond the sample in the study. Different methods vary with regard to these two aspects of validity.

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Internal validity dictates how an experimental design is structured and encompasses all of the steps of the scientific research method. Even if your results are great, sloppy and inconsistent design will compromise your integrity in the eyes of the scientific community. Internal validity and reliability are at the core of any experimental design.

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Reliability and Validity. In order for research data to be of value and of use, they must be both reliable and valid.. Reliability.

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If findings from research are replicated consistently they are reliable. A correlation coefficient can be used to assess the degree of reliability. If a test is reliable it should show a high positive blossomlamar8.ml: Saul Mcleod. Internal consistency reliability is a measure of reliability used to evaluate the degree to which different test items that probe the same construct produce similar results. Average inter-item correlation is a subtype of internal consistency reliability.

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Reliability in research Reliability, like validity, is a way of assessing the quality of the measurement procedure used to collect data in a dissertation. In order for the results from a study to be considered valid, the measurement procedure must first be reliable. Reliability has to do with the quality of measurement. In its everyday sense, reliability is the "consistency" or "repeatability" of your measures. Before we can define reliability precisely we have to lay the groundwork.